Just a Small
2019 · 5m · United States
Directed by Na Kyung Kim
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A tiny eel wishes to become something greater than itself, in a hypnotic tale animated across six giant painted panels.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A tiny eel's existential crisis painted across six panels sounds like the kind of precious indie meditation that usually makes me roll my eyes—except Kim actually commits to the constraint, letting the formal restriction become the thing itself, and there's something genuinely weird about that surrender.
The six-panel structure is a deliberate formal gesture that echoes traditional animation cells and scroll painting lineages simultaneously; it's a short that knows exactly what it's doing with its own materials and demands the viewer slow down to its meditative, constructed pace.
The decision to animate across literal painted panels rather than traditional frames changes everything about how we read movement and time—it's a constraint that becomes the entire language of the piece, and somehow Kim pulls more emotional specificity out of that restriction than most shorts do with unlimited resources.
Reviews
Through art, confusing emotions, which might have been impossible to process without it, can be explored. For Na Kyung Kim, she was at an early point in her animation career and feeling a little insignificant surrounded by "all the talented people in an unfamiliar environment".